THE STRANGER (1946)

Country: U.S.A.

Genre(s): Crime / Drama

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Edward G. Robinson / Orson Welles / Loretta Young

Plot

A government investigator tracks a Nazi war criminal to a small college town in Connecticut in order to bring him to justice.

What I Liked

Edward G. Robinson and Orson Welles are two of my favorite actors of this era so I can’t have many complaints about a movie that pairs the two as its leads.  Robinson plays the stern, no-nonsense character he usually does but is able to show some range as his character is a bit more subdued here than those he played in some of his better-known roles.  As investigator Wilson he plays a man who is a more thoughtful and sympathetic to most of those around him that his typical tough guys.  Yet he remains as passionate, tough, and clever as any of his other roles.  As engaging as Robinson is, he is at least equaled by Welles as the fugitive Nazi Franz Kindler.  Kindler is a mastermind of manipulation and it is easy to see why so many of the other characters fall for his deceits as Welles gives the character charisma and believability.  The character is complex and fleshed-out psychologically in a way that really wasn’t common in film villains until at least the late 1960s.

As a director, Welles is a master of guiding the eye and “The Stranger” is no exception.  The viewer can’t help but be lead through the visual maze of anguished faces, lurking shadows, and strangely ominous settings in exactly the manner Welles intends.  In this way Welles is a master visual storyteller, as if he were reading us a story in limited omniscient perspective, allowing us to witness all of what he wants us to know while keeping us in the very literal dark about what he doesn’t want us to know.

What I Didn’t Like

As ahead of his time as Welles was, he also displayed some of the shortcomings of many other filmmakers of his era and earlier, even the best of them.  At times he sacrifices subtlety for ham-fisted melodrama and hokey images.  This is most obvious in the moving figures on the big town clock on which Kindler obsessively works.  The figures are of a sword-wielding angel chasing after a demon or devil, clearly representing Wilson’s pursuit of Kindler.  The medieval-looking figures are funny looking up there above the otherwise quaint, Rockwell-esque small town and add nothing to the messages or themes of the film.  The role the angel figure plays at the final climax of the film is meant to look like poetic justice but comes off so cheesy it feels like the writers stole the idea from a pulp horror comic of the period.

Most Memorable Scene

Here I chose to pick out a piece of dialogue as my favorite moment from the film.  “There’s nothing to fear in Harper,” says the naïve Mary Rankin, explaining why she doesn’t need a chaperone to talk her home after dark.  The irony of these words coming from a woman who has just unknowingly married a war criminal and murderer prompts a smirk.  But that same irony points to the overall feel and theme of the film that as much Hitchcock as it is Welles.  Even in the most innocent and idealistic of towns, evil lurks.  It’s not out in the open, but it’s nestled safely in family secrets, nasty rumors, and under piles of loose dirt in the woods.  There certainly is something to fear, even in Harper.

My Rating: 4 out of 5